So along comes Microsoft and offers …yet another online backup offering.

Does it allow for geographic limitation of the data to not be tainted by the Patriot act?

Does is allow for fedexing and seeding of backups and restoration of backups?

’cause if you ain’t got that honey, you are not bringing anything to the table. And you -cannot- restore an online backup with any sort of reasonable recovery time unless you have a really really fat pipe.

3 Thoughts on “YABV – yet another backup vendor”

The big issue about Patriot Act grievances is that people don’t realize that all of the North American backbone providers are US companies. A lot of the European connections route through the US too, so if the US government wants to get at your data, they still have a direct on-ramp to your lane on the Information Super-highway. That’s a sad, sad truth about the Internet, and the Patriot Act was designed to allow for wiretapping anywhere along the chain of connections. Love it or hate it, we’re stuck with it. If you don’t like it, use direct, non-Internet routed connections between your systems.

Also, Microsoft doesn’t allow for saved states in their server backup. This is just a backup option for file servers.

If you aren’t using private encryption so that the backup provider can’t see the data either, then you are doing cloud backup/storage wrong.

4th Amendment concerns are legit. Don’t host client or ANY corporate data in the cloud, period, without private very strong encryption. The U.S. government can and will seize data that they have no constitutional rights to. We just haven’t had it challenged in the courts yet.

None of these providers are prime-time ready yet.

I have been testing Backblaze and it has the option to ship you usb keys/disks with your data overnight fedex for a (reasonable) fee. Even given top 1 Gbps bandwidth, it would almost still be faster to sneakernet the smallest data amounts to you via Fedex.

Encryption doesn’t matter when it comes to cloud storage in respect to the Patriot Act. If the US government wants to take packets from some back end connection, they will. If it’s encrypted, they’ll make you decrypt it, or just go to the encryption vendor and force them to do it, or else just do it themselves. Who is going to argue with them, after all?